Kenneth Bruno released a statement only hours after Evans had made his fatal leap. After explaining what had happened in figurative detail, Bruno said that “although the criminal prosecution against Gary Evans is over, my office will continue to make ourselves available to” the families of his victims. He talked about “mixed emotions” during what was going to be a time of uncertainty. Finally, “No one celebrates the death of any individual, even if death would have been the appropriate consequence for his actions. That’s a decision that I won’t have to make in this case.”
What was, essentially, mere politically correct sentiment didn’t bode well with public opinion, however. One man told reporters that Evans had “saved the taxpayers a lot of money.” Another said, “I’m glad he’s dead.” Yet another commented, “I’m not an advocate of anyone dying, but you have to make an exception in this case.”
One of Michael Falco’s brothers told the Times Union, “I think there was a higher court looking to judge this one. His death, the way it all happened, it’s called ‘poetic justice.’”
Regardless of how people felt, Evans was dead. He wasn’t going to hurt anyone again. For Horton and his colleagues, though, they needed answers to several questions—one of which being, how in the hell did a prisoner who was considered an escape risk, to begin with, get out of his handcuffs and hurl himself over a bridge in broad daylight in the presence of four armed marshals?
None of it made sense.
Horton, Dr. Barbara Wolf and several Bureau investigators met at Dr. Wolf’s Albany office later that night to go through Evans’s body with a magnifying glass. Hopefully, they would find some answers. Dr. Wolf had done thousands of autopsies in a career that had spanned decades. She was appointed to collect forensic evidence after the ill-fated TWA Flight 800 crash off Long Island Sound. Well-respected, Wolf was known throughout the forensic community as someone who took her work seriously. If Evans’s body held secrets, Dr. Wolf would find them.
Almost immediately, Evans’s corpse yielded clues as to how far he was prepared to go in order to carry out his plan. After undressing him, Dr. Wolf made note of all his tattoos as Horton and the others looked on. Down near Evans’s Achilles’ heel, they found a paper clip and a blade from a razor taped to his leg underneath his sock. A quick search by anyone at the jail or courthouse would have found it easily.
Horton picked it up and looked at it. “What the hell? How did he get this? How come nobody found it?”
There were some who later insisted that it had to have been a guard at Rensselaer County Jail, but it would never be proven. While others swore it had been Horton, Lisa Morris or Jo Rehm.
The next order of business was to do a full-body X ray.
“That’s when things really got bizarre,” Horton said later.
Bizarre wouldn’t even begin to describe what they found next.
Taking the X ray took some time. But as the X rays came back from the lab and Dr. Wolf and Horton started going through them, they couldn’t believe their eyes.
Buried inside Evans’s left nostril, up inside his sinus, was a handcuff key. About 1½ inches long, the loop end of the key was facing up, while the serrated end pointed down.
Dr. Wolf, with a pair of tweezers, reached up, extracted the key and held it under the light.
Obviously puzzled, Horton and Dr. Wolf looked at each other.
“It was like everyone in the room, at that moment, said, ‘Why, that son of a bitch!’” Horton said later.
Things began to make sense to Horton. The two sets of handcuffs, one of which was unattached from one of Evans’s wrist and the long pinkie fingernail.
He hid that key and retrieved it while they were making their way across the bridge.
Looking closer at the X ray, Dr. Wolf discovered something else. Underneath Evans’s palate, deep in his sinus, what appeared to be a piece of metal with some sort of string attached to it emerged. To get it, however, Dr. Wolf would have to do some internal probing.
With a scalpel in hand, Dr. Wolf cut an incision along the top of Evans’s forehead and along both sides of his face, around the inside of his ears, leaving the area below his chin intact. She carefully peeled back his face and rolled it down off his skull as if it were a children’s rubber Halloween mask.
Immediately, when the inner cavity of Evans’s sinuses was exposed, everyone took a step back because of the rancid stench.
“It was the most profound and grotesque aroma I have ever smelled,” Horton said, “and I have been around a lot.”
The smell was caused by the decaying and rusting metal buried underneath Evans’s palate. Dr. Wolf again took a pair of tweezers, sifted through the bloody tissue and extracted it.
Sure enough, it was a small blade from a razor, about the size of a dime. Most interesting, though, was what Evans had done to the blade. He had drilled a tiny hole in one end and, after taking about fifteen of his hairs and braiding them into a piece of man-made rope, tied it to the blade. Apparently, he had shoved it so far up into his sinus that it forever became part of his body after tissue had entombed it.
Up underneath the left side of his jaw, Dr. Wolf extracted another small blade that Evans had worked in between his jaw and gum, as if it were a piece of chewing tobacco.
From there, Dr. Wolf cut the cap of Evans’s skull off and removed his brain. There were contusions and bruises on the right side, which had turned the white tissue red; the left side was still white, uninjured.
“That’s what killed him,” someone said. “That piece of rebar that hit his head.”
Over the next few hours, Dr. Wolf examined Evans’s entire body, taking it apart, piece by piece, and putting it back together again.
Nothing else abnormal was uncovered. In the end, Dr. Wolf decided the cause of death was “blunt-force injuries of head and torso with basilar skull fracture,” the result of a “jump from [a] bridge.”